Now You See Me
by JumpTheMountain
Summary: Stolen from her home, Summer's life is turned upside down as she is experiemented on. Once escaping from the lab, she stumbles upon others like her. She's free, and for the most part, safe. There's just one problem: she has to go back.
1. Number FortySeven

I remember the day they came and stole me from my home. It was sort of surreal, just like a dream. Normal girls like me didn't get kidnapped; they just didn't.

And I _was_ normal. Long, dark brown hair, brown eyes, freckles, straight teeth, average height. I had straight A's in school, except for the B+ in math. I had two best friends, a mom and a dad, and a little brother. My family had an old fat cat named Winston the Third, and there was a fish tank in the corner of my room, opposite the door. I was normal.

That day, everything changed.

The men that kidnapped me weren't human; I was sure of that the moment I saw them. The bottom halves of their faces were elongated, jutting out like snouts. Pointed teeth sliced down, canines, I thought. Furry, pointed ears stuck up from the sides of their heads, chunks of flesh missing in places where they must have been torn out during a fight. Their eyes were yellow, not unlike those of a cat or wolf. There were two of them.

I was sitting with my legs pulled up to my chest, popcorn bowl next to me, eyes trained on the CSI episode on the television, when I first noticed them. A mistake, a rustle in the bushes outside, was all it took to bring my eyes to the window. They were staring at me, feral grins dancing over their hideous faces. My first thought was, _Werewolf._

I've read in books that you're not supposed to remember screaming, and trying to run away as they leap through the thick pane of glass like it isn't even there. I've read that it's supposed to happen excruciatingly slowly, but you're blinded by fear; you don't remember. Well, the books are wrong. All wrong. It happened quickly, yes, almost too quickly to process, but I did process it, and I remember it all.

I never thought they would be able to get in fast enough to catch me, but they just dove through the glass pane like it didn't exist. I was barely over the threshold when the bigger one grabbed my forearm, squeezing tight enough for his nails to slice through my soft, thin, human skin and leave ugly gashes, tight enough to cause instant bruises. He yanked me back towards him. He didn't even have to push me into the bag; I fell in for him. I remember abruptly realizing that while I had a half-day at school, Travis, my brother, still wouldn't be home for another two hours, and my parents three hours after that.

_I'll be dead before they even know I'm gone._

I screamed again as the bag closed, and again, over and over, until one of the monsters kicked me, right in the ribcage. I gasped as three ribs shattered, another cracked, and two more bruised. The pain was making it hard to breathe. Another bump smashed my head against something hard, and I fell into a welcomed unconsciousness.

When I awoke, I was far from comfortable. My head was pounding, my ribs ached, and cold was pressing in on all sides.

_Maybe this is what hell feels like, _I thought, internally grimacing. _I hope they have food._

A metallic rattle broke the painful silence, but I couldn't bring myself to open my eyes. Maybe if I ignored it, it would go away.

"Get the new ones," someone said. The voice was rough and cruel, deep. Male. Four more rattles echoed around me, one of them directly in front of my face. If I wasn't in hell already, I was sure I was about to arrive in a silver chariot.

A hand gripped my arm under the armpit and yanked, pulling me out of what must have been a cage. I didn't want to open my eyes to find out.

"The one's still out of it," a new voice muttered. The person holding me up, I supposed. They dumped me on another cold surface. A table, maybe. A hand lifted my shirt, freezing hands probing my sensitive, bruised and swollen ribcage. I whimpered.

"They were pretty brutal, huh? She probably won't survive. You still want to go ahead with the injection, boss?"

"Execute the surgery to fix her ribs and the crack in her skull, and then go ahead with the experimental DNA injection. Send someone to let the erasers know to be more careful with the cargo. We can't operate on merchandise damaged more than necessary," the first voice replied, sounding irritated. I didn't blame him. I wouldn't want damaged goods, either.

_I wonder what kind of cargo they're talking about?_ I thought as I was wheeled from the room. _I'll find out later._

As I wondered about what the strange men had been talking about, though, I realized that one of the words hadn't made sense. _Erasers._ Perhaps they were talking about a specific kind of surgeon or doctor. They'd been talking about surgery, after all. But what about the werewolves?

A sharp, stinging pain in my left arm, on the inside of my elbow, tore me from my thoughts, and I fought back a yelp. Almost immediately, I was drowsy.

_Anesthesia,_ I thought sleepily, drifting into sleep.

Waking again in the same cold, hard, cramped cage as before, I determined that the werewolves _must_ have killed me and taken me to hell, silver chariot be damned. I was lying on my right arm, and it was beginning to cramp up, so I shifted, trying to free it. There was a sharp pain as it pulled out from under me, which brought my attention to the areas of my body that should be hurting; my ribs and my head. My ribs only ached. I realized that they must have healed, or been fixed. My head, too, didn't hurt nearly as bad as before, though it still throbbed dully.

"Look at that. You're actually alive. I never would have thought," a harsh, raspy voice whispered from beside me. I turned my head, cracking open my eyes to see, and immediately wished I hadn't.

In the dog kennel next to me was what could have been a boy. He must have been only ten years old. His skin was sea green, small patches of scales scattered here or there. His hair was a silvery white, albino, probably, from lack of sunlight. His eyes glowed an impossibly bright red, the light from them glinting off his pointed teeth. He was truly a creature of nightmares. I pushed myself against the wall of my cage, trying to get away.

"What are you?" I muttered, voice cracking in fear.

"A mutant," he shrugged, grinning maliciously. "You, too, soon, if not already. They've been injecting you with various things over the past few days while you've been out. Some of those might have been DNA. Then again, they might have been waiting for you to wake up to give it to you. They do that sometimes." So he had been human once. Soon, I wouldn't be.

"Who's 'they'?" I asked suspiciously, earning another grin.

"They whitecoats. Doctors. Scientists. Some of us, for the sake of a pun, call them teachers."

"Teachers?"

He dropped the grin abruptly, replacing it with a grim expression. "We call this the School. They take most of us when we're babies, from the hospitals. They tell our parents that we died. Some, though, like you, they kidnap. Most of you don't survive because your developed systems can't handle the mutations. Seventy-five percent of you don't survive, especially if you're injected while you're awake. You'll probably be dead in a few days."

_Wow, way to be supportive._

My attention was drawn from the mutant boy when white light flooded the room, originating from a door on my left. A man's silhouette was outlined in the doorway, tall, but neither lanky nor burly.

"Number forty-seven, it's time for your first dose of avian DNA."


	2. Facility Day

2

The needle was bigger than most; longer, sharper, and thicker. In the place of medicine was some kind of pink, translucent serum. The pain, along with the needle, had increased as the whitecoat slid the needle through the sensitive skin of the inside of my elbow, and I gasped in pain. The whitecoat only grinned before inserting the DNA, pulling out the needle, and relocking my cage.

"Haven't you people heard of a band-aid?" I gritted through my teeth, staring at the blood slowly seeping from the small hole in my arm.

"What's a band-aid?" Mutant-Boy asked curiously, and I felt my stomach sink a little bit.

I changed the subject, not wanting to dwell on longing thoughts of band-aids. "What number are you?"

"I've adapted well and my stats are steady, so they've given me a name, but I used to be Number Twenty." His eyes softened. "There used to be a little girl who spoke French in the cage next to me on the other side—she called me Van, because that's kind of how the French word for twenty sounds; vingt. It stuck, so the whitecoats officially named me Van, like the car. I guess that's their cruel joke."

"What happened to her?" I asked uneasily.

Van grimaced. "She died in the eraser training facility."

"What's that?"

"You'll learn soon enough."

We paused the conversation, settling into an uncomfortable silence. Van seemed to be mourning the loss of his friend, so I took the time to study him. The lighting was dim and the air itself seemed grimy; now that I was calmer, though, I seemed to be seeing more clearly. There were bruises dimming along his arms and all down his chest, disappearing behind his white hospital-gown-material pants that were too small and stopped several inches above his ankles, revealing red, puffy, swollen skin, as if the bones had been broken, healed, re-broken, and healed again. The skin of his stomach was stretched taught over his ribs, and if I didn't know better, I would say you could play them like a xylophone.

Van caught my horrified stare and grinned. "They don't feed us much here. The whitecoats like me, so they feed me more often than most. Everyone else looks the same, but I'm stronger than they are. I don't shake when I walk."

"Who are the youngest children here?" My voice was trembling, trying to decide whether it was angry, terrified, sad, or all three.

Van didn't seem to notice my tone of voice. "Most of us are test-tube babies. We grew up here."

This notion wasn't as disturbing to me as perhaps it should have been; if anything, it was almost comforting. Wouldn't it be better to grow up like this, instead of being stolen from you home, like I had been? Wouldn't it be better to believe that this was just how life was, to not know what they were missing? Wouldn't it be better for them to not have those thought, those memories? My memories and knowledge of things like the sky, the mountains, the beach, the prairies… they would haunt me forever.

That was when reality finally, finally caught up to me. The people, the whitecoats, had been doing this for years—they weren't going to get caught. Probably, they'd faked my death or something. My mom and dad weren't going to come and take me away from this awful place. Already, I'd woken up twice here. This was no nightmare, no cruel joke. This laboratory, this cage, all of it, would be my place for the rest of my life. Whether I died tomorrow or I died years from now was completely and totally out of my hands. The most I could hope for was that they would like me and feed me more, maybe not be as harsh. Escaping this evil place was utterly impossible. Security was too tight. I would never get out.

I was going to die here.

I would never see my mother again, or my father, or Travis. The last thing I'd told him was that he was annoying. And what if Winston got outside through the broken window? He was declawed; he would get scared and hide. My parents would never find him. Who was going to feed my fish?

Taking in all this information was a definite shock to my system. My stomach turned. My face burned both hot and cold simultaneously. Outside noise began to blur together while a loud ringing echoed though my head. I was getting tunnel vision. If someone had asked me to stand up, I couldn't have done it; I felt too weak. My skin was clammy. I began to feel light-headed as the blood drained from my face. My finger and toes felt tingly.

"I don't feel so well…" I mumbled incoherently. If there was food in my belly, it wouldn't be there soon. I doubted, however, that there was anything left to throw up. My body had digested everything already—hopefully, this place had bathrooms. I was going to need to go soon.

"Van…" I muttered. "I think I'm gonna—"

* * *

><p>"Wake up, Seven. It's Facility Day. You don't want them to kick you awake," Van whispered urgently, poking me through the bars of my cage.<p>

Facility Day was a term that I had learned a couple days earlier that was used to refer to the one day every week that four experiments were taken to the eraser training facility, or ETF. The experiments' goals were to try their best to evade the erasers. If you did well, you lived. If they erasers caught you, they either mauled you, killed you, or banged you up badly. That's what had happened to Van a few days earlier, when I'd noticed the bruises all over his body. The whitecoats hadn't let the eraser kill him—they liked him and he was one of the healthiest experiments, which wasn't common. It wouldn't do them well to have him dead.

Erasers, I had learned, were the creatures I had believed to be werewolves. They were called erasers because they simply caused you to seemingly drop off the face of the planet; they erased you.

Van had taken to calling me Seven until the whitecoats decided to give me a name. It would be another week and a half until it would be determined for sure if I would survive the mutation process, but after three days, it was looking good for me. My body was adjusting well to the new DNA; my eyesight was sharper, my ears keener. My body was slightly leaner than before, but not in the way of hunger, though I supposed that may have played a small part. Where I had had no muscle before, I was now a little stronger, but only enough to be barely noticeable. They were starving me. In four days, I'd received half a loaf of stale bread, and one full Gatorade bottle of water.

Since the injection of avian DNA three days earlier, the day I'd fainted, I'd been developing a steadily-worsening itch in the center of my shoulder blades, right in that spot you can't reach. One of the nicer whitecoats, whom I'd actually come to trust, told me my wings were growing in. You can imagine my surprise. Frankly, though, I was excited. Who wouldn't want wings? They wouldn't teach me how to fly, though, Bill said. Part of the experiment was to see how long it would take for me to figure it out on my own. Bill was the nice whitecoat. I liked him. He had taken to calling me by my name, Summer, until I was assigned a name. He said he didn't like calling experiments by their numbers. Said it felt too tacky. He made it a point, though, to call me Number Forty-Seven when other whitecoats were around.

Most of the other experiments had grown to dislike me, since Bill was playing favorite. I don't think they were jealous of my avian side, though, as most of them had their own unique DNA infusions. Some of them hadn't been genetically engineered, but had instead been injected with a serum that gave them cool, comic-book-type powers. There was a girl across the aisle and two cages down from me who could move things with her mind; there was some kind of weakness, though, and the whitecoats had figured it out and used it to keep her from escaping. I think her name was Moss. Don't ask me why.

Some of the experiments said that Bill was Jeb Batchelder's nephew. I didn't think so, because Bill's last name was Daniels, but maybe Jeb had a sister.

The experiments who had been here longer than most of us said that Jeb had taken some kids like me from here and set them free, but I doubted it. He probably had just taken them to a different lab, maybe in Nevada, over the border, or something. Even Bill wasn't _that_ nice.

A tap on the front of my cage snapped me abruptly from my thoughts. There stood Bill, smiling in at me. Bill was young, maybe in his mid-twenties, but he wasn't new here. He seemed genuinely happy. He had short, sloppy brown hair and dark brown eyes.

"You ready to face the erasers, Summer?" he asked cheerily, and I shuddered.

"No, absolutely not. Can I skip?" I pleaded, like I was asking to get out of school—pun intended.

He shook his head regretfully. "I'm afraid not. Don't worry, though. They won't hurt you since you're so new and we don't know your final status yet. They'll chase you around and try to catch you. Try to keep away from them. If you do well, they'll start to like you."

"The erasers?"

"The other scientists. The erasers will never like you, ever. But they don't get to kill you unless we give the go-ahead, which we haven't, not this time."

I looked desperately to Van. I didn't care if they couldn't hurt me. I didn't want to do this. I didn't want to see those awful creatures again.

"Help me, Van," I begged, feeling panic rise in my chest. He reached through the bars of our kennels and gripped my hand tightly, staring firmly into my panicked eyes.

"First, Seven, calm down. They can't and won't hurt you. Breathe. Stay calm. Be cool. Nothing is going to happen to you. Second, make an impression. If you can keep your head and think straight, your survival instincts will kick in. Channel them. Be creative. You want the whitecoats to remember you. And remember: I'll be waiting for you when you get back." He grinned a toothy, sharp-toothed grin and released my hand.

* * *

><p>I stood in my white hospital-style gown next to three other experiments, behind the kind of door they put of storage units, kind of like a garage door.<p>

There was another girl, and two boys; that was the standard procedure. Two girls and two boys.

I recognized the girl from the cage above Van; she didn't have a name yet because she stats fluctuated spontaneously, so she went by Number Twenty-Six. Apparently, she'd known Van for several months, since she had been moved from the care-center for children under five. She was the one who had informed me that Van was actually fifteen, much to my surprise. I'd understood, though, after he'd been let out of his kennel for a run through the White Maze, a set-up of white walls creating a maze that times your speed a being able to get out. He looked much bigger standing up than he did in a cramped cage.

The two boys, I hadn't seen before. One was older, maybe fourteen, a year younger than me. The other looked to be about eleven. Neither of them looked healthy, but they were the non-mutant power-types, so I supposed it could just be the way they were fed or something. I doubted the eleven-years-old would make it out alive.

"Alright, here's how this is going to work," a voice drawled, making me jump. I spun to see a whitecoat strolling leisurely across the empty concrete floor, a cocky I'm-trying-to-act-bored-but-I'm-not-so-secretly-hoping-you'll-die grin spread over his face. He held some kind of electronic gizmo in his right hand, and I wondered what it was. In his left hand, he held four metal hoops, roughly big enough to fit around an ankle.

_Tracking devices,_ I realized, beginning to feel uneasy.

"I'm going to assign each of you a tracking device, so we know where you are at all times in the arena." Arena. He said it like this was a game. "You have forty-give minutes to get out of there alive. This is a level one arena, which means it's only half of a square mile in area. You goal is to evade the erasers. Their goal is to kill you, you, and you." He pointed at the other three in turn, each "you" marking another. Shifting his finger to me, he said, "You, though, they're just supposed to catch you, since you are a potentially successful experiment. For all of you, I have only one piece of advice." He gave a wolfish smile.

"Don't die."

And the door lifted.


	3. The Path of Least Resistance

3

I think they opened the door before giving us the tracking devices to psych us out. I can't speak for the others, but it definitely worked on me.

_Breathe. Calm down. Be cool. Make an impression,_ I told myself, repeating Van's words in my head. _You can do this, Seven._

That was the first time I'd thought of myself as _Seven._ In that moment of panic, though, one thing was clear: I was not Summer any longer. I was Seven, at least until I was given a name. Even then, in the deepest corners of my mind, I would be Seven. I would always be Seven.

When the whitecoat clamped the metal tracker around my ankle, I stifled a scream of pain. The metal was cold, and the tracker a size too small. It was pinching my skin, and already I thought I was losing feeling in my foot. I envied the smaller girl, whose tracker was too big. The boys' trackers fit them better, but they still looked uncomfortable.

"You can run in three…two…one…"

A siren screeched briefly, and the others took off, sprinting down a concrete driveway and into a small forest. I stood there for a moment, shocked and confused, before running after them. I ran down the driveway, over a stretch of gravel, and into the first line of trees. The forest looked just as it might if it belonged to a National Park, like Yellowstone or something. I spotted the older of the two boys leaping through the trees like a monkey, but the other two were out of sight. I supposed that was a good thing.

The siren behind me, back in the building, wailed again.

_Erasers, _I thought, panicking. I threw myself deeper into the tree, running faster than I'd ever run in my entire life. Branches whipped past me, scratching any skin out in the open, tearing my dress along the hems. A howl behind me pushed my legs faster.

The solid thudding noise of erasers behind me caused me to think desperately, looking in every direction for a way of escape.

_There!_

A branch over the path ahead stuck out where I could reach it if I jumped. I leaped as high as I could and gripped the branch, swinging my legs back for momentum. There was a dog-like squeal of pain as my bare foot connected with a furry snout, and then I swung forward, over, and landed on top of the branch. Two more erasers flew by under me. Both of them stopped and turned, staring meanly up at me. The leaner of the two motioned for the other to move on.

The big one ran further into the woods, but the one left with me seemed to be trying to instigate a staring contest. Finally, taking me by surprise, he jumped for me, and I didn't think he could have possibly jumped that high since he was so clunky. I jerked back in surprise and almost fell from my spot in the tree. In order to keep my balance, I kicked out a leg, accidentally on-purposely catching the eraser's jaw. He reeled back, stunned, eyes wide in momentary shock. Retaliating again before he could react, I kicked out for his throat, and then roundhouse-kicked his temple. Immediately, the eraser dropped to the ground, choking on air. When he fell, he landed on his stomach, so I dropped from the tree, landing on his back and driving his face into the dirt. A quick chop to the neck and he was out.

I stared at his body in complete shock for a moment, and then began running. Again.

The dirt path below my feet seemed to fly by even faster than before, if that was even possible.

A thought struck me as I raced down the path, and I swerved to the side, into the trees where it would be much harder to run.

_They expect us to use the paths because they provide less resistance; we can run faster on them, but they're faster than we are. Unfortunately for them, they're also bigger and can't get around as easy._

I ran, dodging around trees, for what felt like forever; my legs were beginning to give out, my breath coming in ragged gasps. If I'd had air in my lungs when I saw a break in the trees, I would've breathed a sigh of relief. With relief, though, came an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach.

_It can't be this easy._

I was right.

As I broke the line of trees on the opposite side of the forest that I'd started, I found myself face-to-face with a building that I assumed was my way out. The door was blocked by the bigger eraser from before.

Thrown over his shoulder was the limp body of the small boy I'd known wouldn't make it.

Seeing the dead body of the boy triggered something inside me. Absolute rage burned in my stomach; fury and adrenaline raced through my veins. My hands clenched, my teeth set on edge, and the muscles in my legs tightened.

"Found a button, have I?" the eraser inquired, flashing a grin.

_He loves this,_ I realized. _He thinks this is the most fun thing in the world._

"You'll pay for his life," I said, my voice shaking with white-hot, complete and utter fury.

"I will, huh? Show me, then." He dumped the boy's body into the gravel. My eyes hovered on the corpse before snapping back to the eraser. He would pay for that. He would pay in blood. That boy hadn't deserved to die.

"You're the worst kind of monster," I stated, struggling to contain myself. "You take pleasure from hurting other people; you torture and kill hundreds of kids. They didn't do anything to deserve it, you know! They're just kids… just innocent little kids who deserve to know what the outside world is like. They deserve to know what it means to be kind, how it feels to not be hungry." A thought rose above the horizon of my mind, dawning realization. "You were one of those kids, once. You were scared, too. They kept you in a cage, and they starved you. And they turned you into this…" I paused, quieting my voice to just barely a whisper as the most sadness I'd ever felt bloomed inside me. "This monster…"

The eraser had adopted a stoic, blank expression. I guess nobody had realized, nobody had understood. Nobody had remembered that the erasers were experiments, too.

"You're bitter," I continued, hoping the whitecoats were listening. "You're angry about what they did to you, so you take out that anger on the rest of us. Maybe it won't hurt as bad for you if the rest of us hurt worse, right? But it doesn't have to be that way." I shook my head. "No. You could try and help us, instead of…" I trailed off, noticing anger beginning to creep into his expression.

_Finally. Wait for the charge…_

"You don't know what I've been through," the eraser growled. "Stop acting like you know me!"

He leaped forward, blinded by anger. At the last second, I sidestepped and stuck a foot out, tripping the clumsy creature. Before he could either fall or catch himself, I cupped a hand around his ear and screamed, causing the eraser to complete his fall with a shriek. He crumpled into a heap on the gravel, tossing his head back and forth in pain. Blood was dribbling out of his ear, a deep crimson stream running down the side of his face. I turned away from him and knelt beside the little boy's body, brushing his dark hair back from his forehead and trailing it down his face.

"Rest comfortably," I murmured, feeling tears rise. I bit them back and turned away, walking back to the building. That was probably the most respectful farewell he would ever receive.

The whitecoat from before was standing in the doorway; there was no garage door on this building. He wore a huge grin on his face, and, strangely, he seems to be proud. His face was practically beaming.

"That was most excellent, Forty-Seven, amazing. I loved that little speech. Was that to get him to make the first move, or was it from the heart?"

"I wanted him to go first," I responded, my voice a monotone. It was a lie, at least partially. At the end, it was from the heart. I had felt sadness in the eraser's blank stare.

"Wonderful, wonderful!" He was squealing in happiness by this time, but I ignored him.

"What are you going to do with Sixty-Two's body, Mason?" another whitecoat asked from a large control panel across the room. Mason, the whitecoat who had given us the tracking devices, stopped laughing, but he seemed more bored now.

_Epic mood-swing,_ I though, reminding myself of something my friends would say.

Mason waved his hand in a careless, dismissive gesture. "Have Bernard come in and take notes on his final stats, and then burn the body. Clean his kennel so the new experiments won't catch any of his diseases."

Cold fury laced through my veins as I heard of the plans for the boy's unceremonious funeral, but I remained silent, knowing I couldn't do anything to change it.

"Oh, and don't forget to remove the tracking device before you dump the body," he added as an afterthought, stooping to remove mine as he remembered. My foot tingled and felt hot as the blood rushed back into it, but it felt good to be able to feel it again.

"You might get your name early if you keep performing well like that. That was impressive. Your stats, too, are off the charts. It's like you were _made_ for those wings!"

"I _was_ made for these wings," I muttered under my breath as Mason continued to babble.

_God, he's a psycho. I wonder if he has MPD?_

Mason led me through a maze of buildings, back to the warehouse-type structure that held my fellow mutants. I know it sounds crazy, but I actually _wanted_ to be back in my cage; I wanted bars between me and everything that could hurt me. And I wanted to talk to Van.

When we finally got to my row of cages, I eyed the other mutants. There was a girl on the verge of death, with rams' horns curling out of her dirty caramel-colored hair. A younger boy like Van, but with sickly yellow skin. There was the body of what looked to be the rotting corpse of a lizard-armadillo cross, but I knew that one had been dead for a while; we'd been smelling it for a couple of days. And, finally, Van, waiting patiently beside my empty dog kennel. I watched as the corners of his lips twitched up when he noticed me.

I climbed back into my too-small cage without resistance, resolving to tell Van the story and then sleep.

I was so tired…

Several days later, I found that my cage was beginning to grow uncomfortably small. My wings were growing a lot faster than before, getting several inches longer every day, and even though I kept them tucked behind my back most of the time, they took up all of the minimal extra space I'd had before. Bill said they would give me an extra-large kennel on my naming day.

Coincidentally, that day was today.

I was happy today for several reasons: one, I would be getting a bigger cage. Two, they wouldn't be loving me to a different section of the warehouse, so I would still be next to Van. Three, I would be getting my name; I admit, I was kind of excited. And four, today I was due for more bread and water.

"Van!" I whispered, poking him through the bars of his cage. I stifled a giggle as he blinked groggily, rubbing green, scaly hands over his bright red eyes.

"Wha's happ'nin'?" he asked blearily. I grinned.

"I get my name today."

He rolled his eyes. "It's not like there's a big ceremony. They just post of piece of laminated paper to your cage with a name and your stats starting today as a basis for progress. S'no big deal. Go back to sleep…"

"But I wanna know my name!" I whined, flexing my shoulder blades impatiently. My wings shifted in return. "Hey, Van?" I asked, quieter this time.

"Mm?" He was already half asleep.

"What color are my wings?" I couldn't see them yet because they weren't yet long enough to stretch into my line of vision.

Van cracked open one eye and studied the small wings peeking out of the slits Bill had cut in the back of my dress.

"Sort of a carmelly brown," he finally muttered, closing his eyes again. "The feathers that help you steer are white."

I was silent. They sounded pretty. I couldn't remember what the feathers on the end were called, either…

"Primary feathers," someone helpfully provided. I looked towards the wall of the cage facing the aisle to see Bill grinning in at me.

"Hi, Bill!" I exclaimed, smiling widely. He'd become very much like an older brother to me.

"Hey, kiddo! Today's a good day, huh? I heard about Facility Day—you cleaned house!"

My smile faded a little bit and I shrugged. "Yeah, I guess. Mason decided that I was "simply _destined_" to be Avian-American," I told him, using my fingers to create air-quotes.

"Sounds like destiny to me," he teased, and I rolled my eyes, deciding to change the subject.

"You've brought my new kennel, yes?" I asked hopefully.

Bill smiled again. "Yeah, I did." He stepped back, revealing a kennel that was at least one and a half times bigger than the cage I had now. I gasped in delight—_This is so sad_—and Van shifted in his sleep. He already had an extra-large cage.

"And I know your name," Bill singsonged. My eyes widened.

"What is it? Tell me, tell me!" I begged, making the biggest puppy dog eyes that I could. Bill laughed and held up a sheet just like Van had described. There, at the very top of the paper, was the word "Whirlwind." Below that were a bunch of statistics that I didn't understand. I stared dubiously at the word printed in bold, underlined, size 72-font at the top of the paper.

"Whirlwind?" I asked, looking up at Bill. "Why Whirlwind?"

He flashed yet another of his ever-frequent smiles. "You'll fly someday, that's reason enough right there. And the way you beat down those erasers, you were like a whirlwind."

I thought about that and then let out a grin unlike any other.

"I love it."


	4. The First Step

**XxXxXxILuvNicoDiAngeloxXxXxX: **_Seriously? That's so cool! ... That makes me mildly feel like a creeper, even though I've never met you, lol._

**SmileRen: **_Soon, young one, soon. Within the next couple of chapters, I promise^^_

* * *

><p>4<p>

By the time my wings had finally finished growing, I had roughly the same amount of space left as I originally had in my first kennel. It was uncomfortable, mostly because my wings were always being pushed against one wall or another, and lying on them hurt. My wings were colored exactly as Van had said, and I guess I was kind of smug. I had badass wings. Van estimated that they were about thirteen and a half feet from tip to tip.

My self-taught flying lessons were beginning today, though when Bill was going to come and get me, I had no idea.

Four days ago, I'd been assigned my name; Whirlwind. Four days, and I still took a few seconds to react when I was called by name. Van called me Windy most of the time. Every time I met a new mutant, though—which was often, because the cages around Van and I were always being exchanged as people died—I asked them to call me Whirlwind. Windy sounded too much like Wendy, and I had never liked that name.

"Hey, Windy—

"Don't call me that."

"Whatever. Wind, what's your plan for flying?" Van asked curiously, messing with a molten feather that had strayed into his kennel.

I shrugged. "I dunno. Experiment with muscles, figure out how to adjust my primaries to flow with the wind currents. I guess I'll flap in slow-motion, y'know, build up the muscles."

"And when you've gotten into the air?"

"Try out different patterns, I suppose. I don't know, I'm not there yet."

The idea of flying still seemed very unreal to me. The wings, too, actually, but I guessed I would get used to them in time. Having wings was cool; I would be able to fly, someday, the way everybody dreams of flying. Maybe I could find a way out…

"So are you going to escape?" Van asked suddenly. My eyes widened with surprise, and I fixed my gaze on him. His eyes were hard, determined. He wanted to know if I was going to leave him here.

I thought for a couple of minutes before answering carefully. "Yeah. I'll find a way out." Van's eyes fell, and for a moment, despair seemed to flash through his scaly features. "But I'll bust you out," I continued, pretending not to notice the hope creep back into his eyes. "If it takes me the rest of my life, I swear I'll find a way to get us out of here, both of us. Alive."

"Don't you like it here, Whirlwind?"

I jumped, whipping my head towards the sound. It was Bill. He didn't look happy.

Recovering quickly, I lied and said, "I was just telling Van a story my parents used to tell me when I was little. It's about an adventurer and his best friend; they get captured on an adventure by the king's knights, and are thrown in the dungeon for a crime they didn't do. The adventurer dies in the end." I shrug. "It was always my favorite story."

Bill's expression brightened immediately at the smooth lie, believing my every word. "Oh, okay! I loved stories when I was a kid, too. How do you remember the lines?"

I throw him a grin. "Practice, and refusing to go to bed until I heard my story."

"Brilliant." He beamed back on me and slid open the latch on my kennel door. "Are you ready to fly?"

I nodded eagerly and scrambled to get out of my cage. As Bill led me out of the warehouse, I sent a meaningful glance back at Van.

He nodded.

* * *

><p>"They're so heavy," I panted, working to unfold my wings. The muscles in my shoulder blades were so weak that I could barely lift them. An hour of working at it and I still couldn't unfold them. An hour, <em>only<em> an hour, and I was sweating.

Bill, to say the least, seemed disappointed in me, like he expected me to do better. He could only offer comments. Suggestions weren't allowed.

"There are… I mean, there's… You can… I mean…" Bill gestured helplessly with his hands, making a motion with them that I'd never seen before.

Suddenly, something clicked, and I felt my expression brighten with understanding. _Wrong muscles._ I stood straighter, rolled my shoulders, cracked my neck, and pulled open my wings.

They opened with a whoosh, feeling like they were barely even there. They were so light!

"Yes!" I shouted triumphantly, pumping a fist in the air. "I did it!"

My wings were held out, kid of folding in at the end to make a sort of wide envelope.

Without thinking, I couched and propelled myself into the air, beating my wings, up and down, up and down, lifting myself higher and higher.

We were outside, Bill and I, in the ninth-level arena for eraser training. It was several square miles in area, but supposedly they had snipers that would shoot me down if I went too far, so I had to mind the fences and air limit. I would find a way out next time, but for now… I just wanted to fly.

Flying came naturally to me. I wasn't clumsy in my weightless glide, and my coasting was solid, no wobbling. The air pushed back my dirty hair. It was greasy with dirt and grime now, but a couple of weeks ago, it had been a dark, clean brown.

I don't know how long I flew for. Minutes, hours, it didn't matter. I was flying. After what felt like eternity yet after no time at all, Bill called up to me.

"Whirlwind, that enough for today. Come back down!"

_But it feels so good!_ I mentally whined, sweeping down lower and circling towards the ground. _How am I supposed to land?_ I wondered.

The landing was wobbly to say the least, but I managed to stay on my feet—barely. I was disappointed to fold my wings in their place on my back, but at the same time, they were so fascinating that I was quickly distracted. I could feel them, now, pressed against my back, better than I could before. The wing-muscles were not yet as strong as they would be after I'd worked with them more, and after their first work-out, they felt good, stretched out. They would be sore in the morning, but I would have to deal with it; lessons—or practice, now, I supposed—were going to take place every day in arena nine until I was a flying expert. After that, I would be assigned to teach those who couldn't learn on their own. That was what Bill had told me yesterday, anyway.

The School, to me, really didn't seem that bad. Sure, I spent my time in a cage, and yeah, I was only given food and water every few days. But I was being treated better than most of the other experiments, and I had _wings_, and Van kept the atmosphere light with humor. I'd already accepted the gruesome circumstances and the fact that I would never see my family again. I tried not to dwell on it too much.

Because of my phenomenal stats, the whitecoats seemed almost afraid to operate on my system, so I only was given an injection every now and then. They even let me out to go to the bathroom once a day.

They didn't have actual bathrooms for the experiments, only a small area of bushes. They were nice enough to plant trees for those of us who were uncomfortable with peeing in front of other people, but you quickly learned to get over that when all the trees were occupied. Trees were mostly only used by newbies who had been stolen like me. The "bathroom" was also a good place to get in a few minutes of conversation with the other mutants; the whitecoats didn't interrupt those of us using the bush. My guess was that they'd been peed on more than a couple of times.

It was unlike me to feel so elated, walking back to my kennel with Bill, but honestly, even in a place like this, who wouldn't? I had just _flown._ With _wings_.

I was so thoroughly wrapped in my thoughts—thoughts of what I would do next, why they had given me wings in the first place, how I would get out of this place—that I didn't notice I had returned to my kennel until the latch slid shut behind me, jerking me from the depths of my mind with a metal clanking.

Rather than turning to send Bill away with a farewell, I retreated to the corner of my kennel, brooding quietly. It must have been an hour to two of thinking until I finally drifted into an exhausted sleep.

And I dreamed.


	5. Time

5

_There was black. Black everywhere. Black surrounding me, enveloping me, pouring over me, filling me. It was endless. The black thrashed wildly, tossing and turning and rolling, like an ocean in a storm. Yet, at the same time, it was peaceful, still. Completely, utterly frozen, as if the space-time continuum had simply been set on pause. It was burningly hot and yet bitterly cold. It was everything in the world and nothing and at all. The black seemed to be the manifestation of life, and yet the very essence of death. It was good and bad, heaven and hell, Jesus and Satan. _

_It was black._

_Only one thing was set, absolutely certain—I couldn't move, couldn't think. If I could have thought, I would have questioned my very existence. I would have wondered, __**Am I dead?**_

"_Time," a voice whispered. "Time is everything. You are running out of time, Whirlwind. Use it wisely."_

_And if black could fade, it did._

* * *

><p>"Whirlwind! Whirlwind, wake up!" Van's panicked voice broke through my groggy, cotton-wrapped unconscious, bringing me up to the surface of my mind, out of the depths of restless dreams.<p>

"What?" The sound came out gargled and mangled, so I cleared my throat and tried again. "What?"

"They're coming!" he whispered, voice quivering with fear. "They're coming, get up!"

I opened my eyes to peer over at him through the bars of my kennel. He was pale with terror, trembling. It looked like he was sweating.

"Who's coming?" I sat up slowly, as if I would be shocked if I moved too fast.

"The whitecoats! You had the dream! You had the dream and now they're coming for you! You have to get out!"

_What dream?_ I wondered. _It was only black._

"I couldn't get out if I tried." I tried to remain clam, to fight back the panic that was beginning to rise in my chest. Van was never scared. Nothing bad ever happened to him. The whitecoats liked me, too… didn't they?

"When they open your cage and pull you out, find a way to get away," he said quickly. "If you can get to one of the arenas—one of the big ones, so the snipers are more spread out and can't find you as easy—fly away. Don't have a stable flying pattern, otherwise they'll hit you."

"But I—

"Shh! They're almost here!"

There was silence for all of two seconds before the door at the end of the aisle creaked open, and two whitecoats strode in with grim expressions on their faces. Hope bloomed when I noticed that Bill was one of them. He wouldn't let anything bad happen to me. The hope withered when a thick, burly eraser trailed in behind them.

_I'm going to die._

"Bill…" I whispered uneasily when they reached my cage, which suddenly seemed infinitely more like the prison it was meant to be. I begged silently with him, begged for him not to let them hurt me. He just shook his head, a gesture that meant, _There's nothing I can do… I'm sorry._

Fear burst throughout my body like little fireworks, paralyzing me.

_I'm going to die._

Bill slid open the latch, his eyes shining with sorrow.

_I'm going to die._

He reached in and gently pulled me from the kennel. I saw Van, pleading with me to run, to get out.

_I'm going to die._

When the whitecoat I didn't know brought a syringe filled with a green liquid out of his coat pocket, reality seemed to smack me in the face.

_I am going to __**die**__._

"No!" I shrieked, ripping myself from Bill's grip. I pivoted on my foot, kicking at the unfamiliar whitecoat's arm, knocking the needle from his grasp. I thanked God for the karate lessons my dad had forced me into a couple of years ago.

Bill stood frozen in shock; he seemed to be reliving some kind of strange, unpleasant memory.

The eraser leaped forward, snarling viciously, and I spun out of the way at the last second. He collided instead with the whitecoat, sending them both tumbling to the concrete floor.

"Go, Seven!" Van yelled, not remembering my name. Maybe it was a reflex; I didn't have time to think about it.

_Run, Whirlwind._ That voice again. The same one from my dream.

I turned towards the door and ran, leaving Bill and Van behind. I streaked through the warehouse door. As soon as I was outside, I crouched and leaped into the air, unfolding my wings and beating hard.

An alarm sounded, a screeching siren that hurt my ears.

"She's getting away!" someone shouted below me as I rose higher and higher into the air. I looked down on the growing group of whitecoats and erasers below me, all of them with angry expressions. One of them raised their arm. They pointed something at me.

_A gun!_

I spun around, no longer facing them, and beat my wings faster, swerving from side to side. A bullet pushed my hair to the side. Another went past my ear. I pushed myself faster.

"Ah!" I gasped, pain blooming along the edge of my left wing. I swerved too far to the left and did a quick spiral before regaining my balance. I was too far away by now for them to hit me again. I wasn't about to go down now. I was free.

_Free._

My flight pattern was very shaky, and the pain in my wing kept me from increasing my speed much more, but I managed to cross several state lines within a few hours.

I went down in a forest on a mountain in Colorado.

* * *

><p>I woke to arguing. A headache pounded along the inside of my skull, the worst migraine I'd had in my entire life. I became aware of the immense aching in my left wing the moment I even thought about moving, and I fought back a groan.<p>

"I can't believe you didn't _tell_ me about this!"

"You were at the store! What was I supposed to do, walk into the grocery store and just tell you we found a bird kid out in the forest? Yeah, right! You'd never believe me!"

A sigh. "Gazzy, do you see how pale she is? And look at the size of the bandage I had to put on her wings just to stop the bleeding. She could have died before I got back."

"She'd been flying for hours, Max," a new voice piped in—a little girl, by the sound of it. "She escaped from the School. They shot her when she was flying away."

There was silence.

"Go get Fang, Iggy, and Nudge, Ange," the first voice said finally. Sounded like an older girl, maybe my age. "Find the first-aid kit, Gazzy. I need Iggy to redo her bandages. Lord knows how good I am at technical things."

"There's nothing technical about wrapping a wound."

"Stop questioning me."

Light footsteps left the room, and then returned a few seconds later. Whatever I was laying on—a bed or couch, maybe—shifted slightly as someone sat down beside me. I winced when whoever it was began unwrapping the thick, heavy bandages. I opened my eyes, needing to see what was happening.

A girl who looked to be my age—she had curly, dirty blonde hair, brown eyes, and a hard look to her—was sitting beside me, working on my wing. Both wings were stretched out beneath me, but it didn't hurt. She noticed me watching and looked at me, smiling.

"Glad to see you're alive. I'm Max," she said quietly.

"Whirlwind," I returned in a whisper, deciding that she wasn't going to hurt me. There was something about her that seemed trustworthy.

A little blonde girl with big blue eyes, who I assumed was the little girl from before, entered my line of vision, trailed by a little boy who looked just like her, taller African-American girl with friendly brown eyes, a really tall boy with shaggy black hair, and another really tall boy with strawberry blond hair and stunning blue eyes… that were focused straight ahead of him, rather than on my face, like the others'. It was as if he didn't know I was there.

"Oh, my God," the African-American girl whispered as soon as she saw me. She put a hand to her mouth, staring at me with wide brown eyes.

"What is this, Max?" the boy with black hair demanded, looking to Max.

"What's going on?" the tall blond boy asked irritably. The smaller boy tugged on his sleeve to pull him down so he could whisper in his ear. I watched as the tall one's eyes widened, and then moved down to the approximate location of my face.

_Blind,_ I thought. For some reason, I wasn't at all surprised.

"Can someone tell me what's going on?" I asked uneasily. All eyes that hadn't been there already immediately snapped to my face, as if it were a miracle that I could talk.

"You're hurt," the little girl replied easily, smiling at me. She couldn't be older than seven. "We're the Flock. I'm Angel." She pointed to herself. "This is Gazzy"—she pointed to the one who looked to be her brother—"Fang"—the boy with black hair and an angry gaze—"Iggy"—the blind boy—"Max"—the girl beside me—"and Total!" she finished, lifting a little black Scottie dog from the floor.

"Pleasure to meet you," the dog said cheerfully. I stared at him, my gaze morphing from incredulous to confused to wary within a few seconds. The others didn't seem surprised at all, and I'd seen things that easily surpassed this on the crazy scale.

"It talks," I deadpanned.

"Yeah, he does that," Max said easily. She leaned forward to pull Iggy towards the bed. "Ig, come here. I want you to check out the damage."

"But… he's blind," I protested, eyeing Iggy's hand as Max guided it towards the bullet wound in my wing.

"I promise I won't hurt you," he muttered, his head turning ever-so-slightly towards the sound of my voice. "I'm good at this. I've had tons of practice."

I closed my eyes, bracing myself for pain. "Okay," I whispered.

I winced when I felt his long, pale fingers brush over the wound, light as fluttering feathers—no pun intended. The pain, however, didn't come.

"Not too bad," Iggy mumbled, as if to himself. "Barely missed an artery. You got lucky…" He seemed to be searching for a name.

"Whirlwind," I supplied, opening my eyes to watch him work.

"Wind," he repeated, shortening the name. It seemed that in this strange, mismatched family, they liked shorter names. Iggy withdrew his hand from the wound and reached for the first-aid kit.

"Wait," I said quickly, before he could grab the disinfectant. "How do you know how to do all of this? I have… I have _wings._ You're acting like it's not a big deal."

Slowly, every single person in the room, including Total the dog, unfolded all different colored wings from behind their backs. Small smiles danced across all their lips, even Fang, the bad-tempered one. My eyes grew wide.

"Oh," I whispered, understanding filling my mind.

"Max isn't very good at first-aid," Iggy laughed. "Let me fix you up right."


	6. The Eyes Will Change

6

"And then she told me she was getting a hamburger for lunch, and I almost, like, fainted. I was like, do you even _know_ how many carbs are in a hamburger? They're totally unhealthy! I mean, it's not like she has mutant metabolism. I can go through, like, four hamburgers and _still_ have room for fries. And she's, like, a hundred and thirty pounds. That extra thirty shouldn't even be there, not to mention when the fat catches up to her in a few years. She'll weigh, like, a zillion pounds…"

I resisted the urge to bury my face in my pillow and groan. Nudge had been talking for three hours straight, and I was still debating whether or not I'd actually seen her take a breath twenty minutes earlier. I'd been offered the extra bed in Nudge's room, and, unknowing of her super-human ability to talk for hours on end, had accepted.

_Get used to it, Whirlwind. It can only go uphill from here… unless there's a way to surpass rock bottom,_ I thought to myself, shuddering internally at the idea.

Nudge abruptly switched topics, as she had a habit of doing, when she cut off, glaring at the closed bedroom door.

"Go away, Gazzy!" she yelled, lifting her pink hairdryer from her bed. She held the thing like a weapon, and I admit, it was kind of scary.

_She does that. You'll get used to it,_ Angel's voice told me, echoing around in my head.

_That makes two things, _I thought back to her.

Angel's freaky ability was that she could read and send thoughts like IM's, control minds, breathe underwater, and shape-shift. She was incredibly frightening for a seven-year-old.

Gazzy—or the Gasman—could let loose some insane kind of Godzilla gas that apparently stunk to high heaven, but the first time his backside exploded, I just laughed and gave him a high-five. He could also perfectly mimic nearly any sound he had ever heard, which was strangely awesome. I kind of envied him for it.

Nudge could search through computer information just by touching the device, and metallic things like pens and Coke cans were drawn to her if she wanted them, on top of her breaths that lasted forever…but only if she was talking.

Fang had this creepy ability to disappear where he stood, if he was still for long enough. I'd be lying if I told you it wasn't the creepiest thing I'd ever seen. Imagine the things he would see if he hid in choice places…

Because Iggy was already blind, his other senses were freakishly well-developed, even for an experiment. If you stood against a background of solid white, though, he could see you. Like, legitimately see you, as if he could see just as well as you and me. And if he touched something, he immediately knew the color. Instead of finding Iggy's abilities scary, though, I thought they were kind of cool.

Flying really fast was Max's specialty, and by fast, I mean two-hundred-fifty miles an hour fast. Oh, and she had a voice in her head. Kind of like the kind people get when they're insane, except she was completely sane. I think.

I wasn't really looking forward to developing powers, if I developed them at all. I was happy with just the wings; extra super-human-mutantness just wasn't needed.

I was drawn from my thoughts by a wicked cackling originating from the opposite side of the door, the kind that you see in horror movies that make chills from a marathon up and down your spine.

"Can't get out now, Nudge," Gazzy hooted, his voice reflecting the kind of evil that comes with little brothers.

"There's a window," Nudge reminded him, twirling the hairdryer boredly.

"Got that covered!" he shouted gleefully. I could hear the smirk in his voice.

Slowly, I rose from my bed and walked cautiously to the window, peering up through the glass. Sure enough, a big plastic paint bucket was hanging precariously over the edge of the roof, and a string connected the rim of the bucket and the edge of the window. If we tried to open it, the bucket's mysterious contents would spill all over us. No doubt something similar was attached to the door.

We were trapped.

I glanced around the room, an idea creeping into my mind. Spotting a tall, towering stack of magazines in the corner of the room, I asked, "Nudge, how much do you treasure those magazines?"

She shrugged. "That's only half of them. I have a second copy of each of those in the closet in case I love one or something. Why?"

I grinned. "I'm going to need to borrow them."

Twenty minutes later, all carpet within a five-foot radius of both the window and the door had been covered in two layers of magazines. Nudge stood beside the door, and I beside the window. We glanced at each other and nodded, each holding up three fingers. We began counting down.

Three…Two…One…

The window and door flew open simultaneously, Nudge and I leaping away towards the center of the room.

Thick, gooey, semi-translucent, dark brown goopy liquid spewed on to the magazines, and a sickly sweet smell flooded the room. Large gobs of what looked like frosting were scattered through the liquid.

"Ew!" Nudge exclaimed, wrinkling her nose in disgust.

"What _is_ that?" I asked as I eyed the sticky mixture with distaste.

_Iggy says it's maple syrup and chocolate frosting, and a little sugar,_ Angel piped up, trying to be helpful.

"Gross…" Nudge and I muttered at the same time. Angel must have told her, too.

"Did we get 'em?" Iggy's voice floated down the hallway. He sounded eager.

"No." Disappointment flitted through Gazzy's voice—it sounded like he was closer, maybe a few feet down the hallway. "They tripped both traps and then jumped out of the way."

I craned my neck, trying to see around the corner, where I suspected the boys to be standing. Maybe…

Tiptoeing quietly across the room, I scooped up a particularly nasty magazine, holding it carefully so the syrup wouldn't spill on to the carpet. I looked to Nudge, motioning for her to be quiet. Her eyes flicked from the magazine to my face, back and forth, a few times. She didn't understand until I made a throwing motion with my free hand. A wide, evil grin spread across her face, and she nodded and armed herself with her own floppy, sticky weapon.

We crept forward, somehow landing silently when we jumped over the magazines—must be a bird-kid thing—and pulled back our arms to throw the magazines… and were hit in the faces with two streams of ice water.

"Ah!" Nudge squealed, and I gasped at the sudden cold.

Before us were Gazzy and Iggy, each with a water gun filled with water and a few cubes of ice. They stared at us as we dripped all over the carpet before they both burst into laughter. Most of the things in the house were white, to make it easier for Iggy. Which meant he could see me soaking wet. In my white hospital gown. Which was now transparent.

My face brightened instantaneously to the color of a ripe tomato, and I self-consciously brought my arms up to cover myself. Iggy smirked.

"Feeling a little cold, Wind?" he asked teasingly, but I just frowned at him.

"I am, actually, and I don't have any other clothes," I said stiffly, taking a step forward. "Excuse me while I go find Max."

Iggy's smug expression remained as he stepped aside, motioning mockingly for me to pass. I glared at him and strode past, fighting back the embarrassment.

I found Max in the kitchen a couple minutes later, eating a bagel with cream cheese. She choked with laughter when she saw my arms over my chest. I grimaced.

"Um, could I borrow some clothes? Iggy and Gazzy—

"Water guns, again?" she guessed, her lips twitching as she fought back laughter. I nodded helplessly, and she sighed, probably sending Angel a thought to tell the boys to clean up their mess. "Alright, come with me. I've got some clothes that should fit you until we can get you your own. Is there anything you would prefer?" she inquired as we made our way back upstairs, where the boys were cleaning up the mess. Iggy flashed me a knowing grin, and my face turned a rosy shade of pink as we passed.

"Um, just something comfortable," I mumbled, looking away. Max glanced curiously between us and smirked a little, but didn't say anything. With both Iggy and Gazzy well within earshot, she said, "Ignore him; he's the resident pervert."

I laughed outright, and I was pretty sure I heard the Gasman snicker behind us.

"And proud of it!" Iggy called back to us, making me laugh a little harder. I'd never seen anybody openly call another person a pervert, and then seen that person freely admit it. Max laughed a little with me until she shut the door of her room behind us and went to dig through the big dresser in the corner.

Max's room was fairly simple, in a good way. The furniture was white. The walls were painted a comfortable dark brown, though the carpet was more of the honey color. There was one window on the wall opposite the door, with transparent white curtains pulled back to reveal… nothing?

Perplexed, I went to the window and looked down. The house's edge was supported by thick wooden beams embedded in the side of a cliff. The edge of the cliff was a sheer, nearly vertical drop.

"Cool, huh?" Max's voice came from beside me, and I jumped.

"Uh, yeah… doesn't it scare you?" I asked curiously.

Max laughed instead of answering my question, and handed me a pair of blue pajama bottoms decorated with little clouds, and a dark, baggy gray t-shirt.

"The shirt is Iggy's. I stole it from him a while ago. It's really comfy," she explained when I looked confused.

I nodded comprehendingly as Max continued. "Just so the guys don't walk in on you, you can use my bathroom," she told me, pointing to the closed door by the dresser. "The Gasman rigged the water-heater or something, so don't worry about using too much hot water." She flashed a grin. "Unlimited supply."

I smiled uneasily back at her. _I hope it doesn't explode…_

_Oh, it won't. Only happened once, and that was a long time ago,_ Angel assured me. I nodded absent-mindedly, knowing she couldn't see me. What she said wasn't comforting in the least, but she meant well.

Somehow over the past few seconds I'd ended up in the bathroom with the door shut. I frowned as I saw my reflection in the mirror; long, dusty, dirty brown hair stretched over my shoulders and stuck up in irrational places; my dark brown eyes, which had once been so happy and full of life were now dull and weary, edged with fear. There were not my eyes. These eyes belonged to somebody else.

_No,_ I disagreed with myself. _You're thinking of Summer's eyes. These are Wind's eyes. Your eyes._

I climbed into the shower, haunted by thoughts of eyes.

_My eyes._


	7. The Essence of Tears and Peanuts

7

It had been a week. An entire week since the Flock had found me. My wing had been completely healed two days after I'd taken residence in Nudge's room.

The topic of recent discussion was whether or not I would stay with them.

We were seated around the cluttered dining room table. Everyone else was arguing heatedly while I sat quietly between Nudge and the Gasman.

"Of course she's staying!" Max shouted, standing and slamming a fist down on the table. "She's one of us! We can't just throw her out on her own!"

"She's a danger to the Flock," Fang stated calmly, his arms crossed tightly over his chest the only indication of his aggravation. The Flock was what they called themselves. Witty, I supposed. "Her scent is still left out in the woods where she crash-landed. The whitecoats and erasers will be after her. She can't stay here."

"They're after us, too," Angel pointed out. "They're going to find us eventually, anyway. They always do."

"What if she's a spy?" Iggy wondered aloud, glancing subtly at me. Nobody else seemed to remember that I was even there. I kind of got the impression that he only brought up the spy thing for the hell of it.

Angel sent him a confused look. "She's not."

He shrugged. "Just an idea. It's not like they haven't tried it before."

The Gasman erupted into laughter, and everyone else chuckled a little bit, too, but I remained silent, left out of some humorous memory. Part of me knew I didn't belong here.

"I think she should stay," Nudge put in. "She's one of us. And besides, she's the only one who hasn't said "shut up" to me yet."

Iggy chuckled. "Yeah, the Nudge Network. Give it time, Nudge. She'll come around soon enough." She shrugged.

"For what it's worth," Total piped up from his spot in Angel's lap, "I like her. She makes me my own serving of bacon every morning, which is more than I can say for the rest of you." He glared pointedly around the room, his expression lightening as it landed on me.

Max sighed and shook her head, finally looking to Angel. "What do you say, Ange? Yay or nay?"

"Yay," she said, not missing a beat. A chorus of yays spread around the room.

"Nay."

All eyes swiveled to Fang, to whom the only negative vote belonged. I looked to Max, who everyone seemed to have silently voted to be leader years ago. She was glaring at Fang, eyes narrowed into slits in frustration.

"Majority points to yay. She's staying," she grit through her teeth. I could see the anger frothing just beneath the surface of her eyes, barely concealed. "May I speak to you privately, Fang?" Without waiting for a reply, she stomped out of the room and up the stairs. Fang trailed quietly behind her. A few moments later, a door slammed.

"Let the yelling begin," Iggy muttered, pushing back his chair to stand. He scrubbed a hand through his hair wearily. "I'm going outside if anybody needs me."

Everybody eventually dispersed, but I stayed sitting at the table for a few moments before sighing and sliding out the back door to fly up to the roof.

From the roof, it seemed one could see forever. The trees stretched on for miles and miles, and behind me the mountains continued on. The sky was clear today; the entirety of everything around me seemed much too happy for there to be such arguing beneath me, and such sadness spreading through my soul. Once again, I was mourning the loss of my family.

I trudged wearily to the chimney and turned my back to it, leaning heavily on the weather-worn bricks. Feeling despairing, frustrated tears rise in my eyes, I slid down and pulled my knees into my chest, burying my face in my arms as I began to rack with tears.

I'm not sure how long I sat there, though I'm sure that it was by far the longest I'd cried in my entire life. After what could have been minutes yet what could have been hours, footsteps announced the arrival of another Flock member. I didn't look up to see who it was, just tried to slow the tears, quiet the sobs. The footsteps ceased right beside me, and there was a muffled thump as someone sat next to me. My face remained hidden.

There was a sigh, and then strong arms pulled me to the person's chest in what I supposed was a comforting hug. I buried my face in their shirt and cried harder, leaving whatever quiet I'd built behind.

Whoever it was, they didn't say anything. I appreciated that; words, at this moment, seemed wrong, as if they would cut the atmosphere unevenly and leave empty the space that silence should be filling.

After a long time, the sobs subsided to whimpering, and whimpering to sniffles, and, eventually, the sniffles faded to silence. Sitting for several minutes with my tear-stained face buried in the mystery-person's chest eventually began to feel awkward, and I pulled away, wiping at my eyes and sniffing one last time. I looked up at them, and my eyes widened in surprise.

_Iggy?_

The corners of his lips twitched up, as if he could feel my surprise, as if it had been made tangible in the air.

"You must be really miserable. The case was adjourned three hours ago; I found you exactly two hours and forty minutes later. And I suspect you've been crying most of that time."

_Three hours? It's been a little longer than I thought._

"How did you know it was me?" I asked, my voice barely above a whisper to prevent it from cracking.

"Stupid question," he said, waving his hand dismissively, but he answered it anyway. "The Flock doesn't cry that easy. I suspect you'll get over whatever's been bugging you soon enough. For what it's worth, if it's Fang, ignore him. He's a jackass."

"I don't care what he thinks," I muttered, wiping the last traces of tears from my eyes. "Guys like him always creeped me out, anyways."

Iggy laughed. "Why don't you come inside with me? You can help me cook dinner. How does Japanese stir-fry sound?"

I was about to comment on the fact that he's _blind_, but then remembered that the entirety of the kitchen was white. Even if it wasn't, I somehow doubted that Iggy would need to see. So instead, I smiled, not caring that he couldn't see, and said, "Yeah, sounds great. You've got peanuts, right?"

Iggy paused from where he was about to jump from the edge of the roof. "Why would I put peanuts on stir-fry?"

I gasped and gaped at him. "I'm converting you to peanut-ism tonight. To the kitchen!"

For the fun of it, I did a Superman jump from the roof. Iggy laughed and followed after me.

That night, we bonded over peanuts.

* * *

><p><em>Fffffft.<em>

My eyes snapped open, my hand immediately clapping over my nose and mouth to prevent the gas from reaching my lungs and doing serious damage to my nervous system.

"I'm up, I'm up!" I shouted, scrambling out from under the covers of my blessedly warm bed.

Gazzy laughed, immune to his own personal nauseous bomb. He'd been trying to wake me up for the past half hour, but to no avail. Playing Mission: Impossible until the wee hours of the morning just does something to a person's ability to stay awake. Iggy, of course, had won every round. Ironically, he was much better at navigating when he was blind, rather than when he could see.

"Shopping time!" Nudge singsonged as she entered our bedroom. She must have spent the last two hours in the bathroom, as per usual.

I rolled my eyes. "Awesome. Can't wait. Why was it necessary for the Gasman to do his thing in my face?"

Nudge shrugged. "I asked him to get you up. The mall in Denver opens in about an hour. If we want to beat the crowds, we'll have to leave in five."

_So business-like,_ I remarked to myself, internally rolling my eyes.

"And we have how much money?" I asked as I bragged the pair of jeans and ¾ sleeve white tee I'd borrowed from Max. "Gazzy, out," I added, pointing to the doorway.

He pouted—he took after Iggy with all the pervertedness—and trudged out of the room, Nudge kicking the door shut behind him so I could change.

"One hundred and fifty," she said, sounding reluctant, as if it wasn't enough. "Max said only a couple pairs of jeans, a few shirts, and a pair of PJs."

"I agree with her," I muttered, resigning myself to the task at hand. As I pulled my shirt over my head, Nudge grabbed my wrist and dragged me downstairs. She barely gave me time to slip on Max's old tattered pair of slippers before she was outside and doing an up-and-away.


	8. Every Night

8

I was exhausted. Dreams, these days, seemed to haunt me, but they were always the same, each night tortured by one of two. The first was simply an echo of the dream I'd had the day I'd escaped from the school—small changes in the dream shifted each night, taunting me, crying out to me, and I could never figure out what those changes were. The second, and perhaps the more frequent of the two, was the one that also caused me to wake every time afterwards with terrified tears streaming down my cheeks.

It was always Van, pleading with me to help him as Bill and the other whitecoat mercilessly injected his arm with the poison that would kill him, the poison that was meant for me.

"_No_!" I would always scream, lurching forward to wrench him away from them, but I could never reach him. Somehow, no matter how close he seemed to be, he was always out of reach. Nearly every night, I would watch Van meet the fate that had been meant for me. Nearly every night, I would watch my best friend die. Nearly every night, I was awoken by my own screams.

This night was one of those nights.

It was around 2:45 in the morning when my own blood-chilling screams wrenched me violently from the nightmare. My body was sticky with cold sweat, my eyelashes wet with tears. This was the usual by now. Instead of wasting my time trying to go back to sleep like I had the first few days—it had begun after spending roughly two weeks with the Flock and had been continuing for about a month—I threw back the covers and made my way to the bathroom, not having to look to know exactly where I had to step over any miscellaneous items.

The cold shower water didn't help much to wash away the memory of the dream, but it did help take my mind off of it.

I sighed, trying to shake off the exhaustion. Drowning in the shower would really suck.

After nearly an hour of cold water pelting my back, I finally switched it off and climbed out of the shower, determining that I would go downstairs, make pancakes and bacon, and watch Disney Channel.

_At least I can still keep some old habits,_ I thought to myself with a small smile. When I was a little kid and had nightmares, I would make myself an extra early breakfast and watch Disney Channel to get my mind off of it; the habit had remained, no matter how much I'd grown.

I found the ingredients for pancake batter easily enough, only taking a couple of minutes to search the fridge for the milk—which happened to be way in the back, so I spent the majority of those couple minutes removing and putting back the things in my way.

A few minutes later, bacon was sizzling merrily on the stove and pancakes were baking on the small pancake grill that Iggy often used. I switched off the ovens, loaded my plate, and began flipping through the television channels, searching for Disney.

I was happy to discover that it was playing an old rerun of one of my favorite shows.

Fang arrived downstairs and six o'clock, his usual time. He greeted me with a wary glance and a nod, which I returned before turning my gaze back to the television.

I felt the couch shift beneath me as someone sat down, and I looked to see Fang seated a couple feet down, looking like he didn't quite know what to do. I gave a mental shrug and looked again to the television.

"Wind?" he said finally, his voice quiet. I looked back at him, eyebrows raised in a prompt for him to continue. He paused to study me before plowing on. "I think I was being unreasonable when I said I thought you shouldn't stay. Like Max said, it wouldn't be right to throw you out on your own. I was wrong. I'm sorry."

I was so stunned by the apology that I didn't know what to say for a few moments. My mouth opened and closed in an attempt to force words into existence, but I ended up just waving my hand and saying, "No big."

He nodded and stood to leave, but paused when he reached the kitchen threshold, turning back to say something. I raised my eyebrows again.  
>"Yes?" I said curiously.<p>

"I just…" he hesitated, seeming to be searching for the right words to phrase what he wanted to say. "I just wanted you to know you're welcome here, okay? You're kind of like a part of the family now."

This time, I was shocked into absolutely silence.

"_A part of the family,"_ he said. _"You're always welcome here, okay?"_

* * *

><p>"So then you just sprinkle some salt on the yeast—no, you have to mix it together, otherwise the "boom" isn't nearly as satisfying—and pour a little olive oil—don't be shy—and here, give me the lighter… now <em>run<em>!"

The Gasman leaped to his feet and sprinted for a few feet before launching himself into the air with me hot on his heels. There were a few seconds of absolute silence before a shuddering _boom_ shook the air. I spun in air and hovered, watching as an area in the trees was blown to smithereens. How Gazzy figured out how to prevent a forest fire, I didn't know, but the explosion all the same was amazing.

The Gasman laughed in glee, and soon I joined him, slapping him a high-five.

"That was _awesome_!" I shouted in excitement. "I love it!"

Gazzy grinned back at me. "Wait until I teach you to make portable bombs and grenades—_then_ we'll be having some real fun!"

I felt the urge to laugh hysterically. I hadn't felt so excited about anything in my entire life, and I told Gazzy so.

"You, my friend, have a lot to learn, but we might make a bombist of you yet!"

"We?"

"Yeah, me and Iggy."

Somehow, that didn't surprise me. Iggy had a thing for cooking with fire.

"What about me?"

We turned in the air to see Iggy hovering a couple of feet away. Sensing my confusion as to how he'd known where we were, he explained, "I heard a boom and came to check in out, and I'd recognize your guys' voices anywhere."

"I'm teaching Wind how to make bombs!" Gazzy said excitedly. I didn't think it was possible to bounce in mid-air, but the Gasman was proving me wrong. "She's totally one of us!"

I grinned. "What can I say? My favorite movies always have explosions. My parents would never…" I trailed off as the boys' grins faded at the mention of my parents. "Um… nevermind. I'm starving. I'm gonna head back to the house to grab some grub," I muttered awkwardly, swerving around to head back towards the Flock.

I wasn't kidding about being hungry, though; ever since the genetic engineering, I could eat roughly seven square meals a day, and that was if I was being lazy and not burning calories. The meals Iggy cooked were impossibly huge, and when Max went to the grocery store, I couldn't help but wonder how we paid for it all. A part of me doubted that they earned the money.

When I reached the house, I folded my wings and dropped straight toward the deck, head first. I flared my wings at the last second and pulled up. It hurt, but Max, who was helping me to get better at flying said that my muscles just needed to get stronger. I landed on the deck jogging, so I just kept going to the door until I slowed down.

Angel was eating strawberries—her favorite—at the dining room table with Total, and they both looked at me as I slid the glass door shut behind me. Angel finished chewing, swallowed, and then said, "Don't take their reaction to heart, Wind. None of us really knew our parents—except for Iggy, but that didn't work out—so we're all a little jealous that you grew up normal. Don't worry, they'll get used to it."

Resigned by this time to her habit of tapping into other people's thoughts, I just nodded wearily and went to the fridge, pulling out a bag of grapes, various melons, a few apples, and a pineapple to make a fruit salad. I'd never been partial to junk food, though the other Flock members ate plenty of it. They were still recovering from shock when a couple of weeks ago, I'd politely refused a family size bag of potato chips, opting instead for a large bag of trail mix, which was one of my favorites.

"You know," Total mumbled around a mouthful of strawberries, "you never did tell us your story. Where did you come from? Did you grow up in the School?"

I shook my head and began slicing a cantaloupe into bite-size pieces. "No. Two erasers stole me from my home in Pennsylvania a few months ago. They took me to the School, but I didn't know it then because I'd been knocked out early on in the kidnapping. They put me in a bag.

"It's scary, you know? Waking up in a cramped cage with broken bones and a severe concussion, having no idea where you are and why. I was terrified.

"There was a boy maybe a little older than me in the cage next to me. I think he was injected with the DNA of some kind of fish." I smiled a sad smile at the memory. "His name was Van.

"They liked me, the whitecoats. I wouldn't say they treated me well, but they didn't perform many experiments on me beyond the DNA injection, and I got fed more often than the others.

"There was one whitecoat who seemed to care for me. His name was Bill. He called me by my name instead of my number, and when they assigned me the name of Whirlwind, I think he had something to do with it. He was kind of like a big brother.

"One day, the day I escaped, I had a dream. There was black all around me, and a voice. It told me I was running out of time. Van woke me up and told me the whitecoats were going to kill me because I had the dream. I escaped when they opened my cage and started flying. I finally passed out in the air after a few hours, and woke up here. You know the rest."

There was silence for a few moments before Angel asked, "What was life like before the erasers took you?"

I smiled sadly. "Life was really good. My parents really loved me and my brother, Travis. God, I miss him, even if he _was_ the biggest pain in the butt to ever be born. I used to have this really fat cat called Winston. Before I met you guys, I thought nobody could eat as much as he could. I spent a lot of my time with my best friends, Annabelle and Macey. We would spend our time watching CSI or prowling the mall for a good pair of jeans. I really…" I choked on the memories. "I really miss all of that."

By the time I'd finished, my fruit was all chopped and sliced, but I didn't feel hungry anymore.

"You shouldn't dwell on the past," Angel said finally, her eyes soft with silent concern. She was strangely mature for a little kid. "Max says that thinking about things that aren't possible anymore is unhealthy. It's better to look to the future instead."

"That's right, kiddo," Max said as she rounded the corner. She must have sensed that something was wrong, because she looked sharply at Angel and said, "What's wrong?"

Angel's eyes bore into Max's for a couple of minutes as silence settled over the room, and finally max softly muttered, "Oh. I see." She looked to me, appearing to be at a loss for words.

"It's okay," I mumbled, putting my fruit salad in the fridge for later. "I'll get over it someday." Max stopped me as I tried to leave.

"That the things, though," she said. "You won't get over it. You're always going to miss them, Wind, always going to wonder where they are and what they're doing. It doesn't go away. It won't ever go away."

I resisted the urge to snap at her. "If I'm always going to feel like this, then there's no point worrying about it. I might as well get used to it," I said wearily. I really just wanted to go take a nap, nightmares be damned.

"Look at me, Wind," Max said, and I raised my eyes to hers. "Let us help you," she told me softly, looking sincere.

"One never learns to stand on their own two feet if they're always depending on others to hold them up."

"And even the strongest of buildings have support."


	9. When One Door Opens

9

The day after I'd had the "discussion" with Max in the kitchen, I realized that it was a mistake. I should have asked Angel not to say anything, but by the time I'd realized it, Angel had shared my thoughts with everyone.

Nudge tried to empathize, and even toned down the volume on the channel, but I could still hear her mumbling to herself every now and then.

The boys had taken to leaving me alone, only saying hello every now and then and only speaking to me when necessary. I supposed that was what guys did when they knew someone was upset.

Only Max, Angel, and Total acted as if everything was completely normal, and I tried to follow their lead. Nothing had changed. Everything was normal.

Until the erasers found me.

I'd been with the Flock for a while, and I admit, I'd begun to sink into a routine, and believed they wouldn't find me.

On my period, I'd been so reduced to cravings that I'd spent the entire day lounging on the couch with a family-size bag of potato chips—actually, I'd gone through several—and watching Disney Channel. In the background, explosive _booms_ could be heard. I assumed that the Gasman was detonating his daily explosives.

Someone knocked on the door. Out of reflex and what comes of only half-way thinking, I got up to get it.

When I swung open the door, I was confronted by a large, bulky man with a feral grin spread over his face.

"Good afternoon, Whirlwind. Long time, no see, eh?" he greeted me, his voice deep and rough. I eyed him warily.

"I don't remember ever meeting you… How do you know my name?" By this time, I was so used to being called Whirlwind that I didn't remember that it wasn't a normal name—I didn't remember that he must be from the School to know my name.

"Oh, what, you don't remember me?" he mocked me, placing a hand over his heart. "I'm wounded."

"Who are you?" I asked, becoming uneasy. Who was this man? What did he want with me?

He smirked. "My name is—

"Ari, hey. Been a while, old pal."

I jumped, looking over my shoulder to see Max standing behind me. She wore a confident smirk, but her muscles were tense.

The man in front of me—Ari—grinned. "Hey, Max. Great to see you again."

"Um, pardon my interruption, but how do you know who I am?" I broke in, eyeing the large man and the leader of my adoptive family as they stared with malicious, mock politeness at each other.

"Don't tell me you don't remember," Ari said, smirking in a way that made me uneasy. "That fat cat of yours, the one that eats way too much, would've made a lovely snack if I hadn't been on the job."

The sound of Iggy's snickering echoed down the stairs, but I ignored him as I began to piece together who this strange man was.

"_You_…" I whispered, eyes growing wide with horror. "You were there. You were one of them."

His grin grew wider. "That's right, kid. I have to say, though, those screams were impressive. Had to kick you to shut you up. I heard Marco hit your head pretty hard on the helicopter door. Pity. I would've liked you to have been conscious to terrify you further, but you were bleeding too much and wouldn't wake up."

I hadn't realized I'd been backing away from him until I ran into Max, who grabbed my shoulders and pushed me towards the kitchen.

_Max says to go out the back door and get away,_ Angel thought to me. I was about to turn and run, but Ari said smoothly, "Don't bother. The house is surrounded."

I stopped short, my actions unsmooth and jerky.

_We've got company._ I didn't have to guess to know that it was a mass-message from Angel. Immediately, Fang, Iggy, and Nudge appeared from upstairs, and the faint explosions stopped.

"Ah, and the rest of them," Ari said grandly, opening his arms as if introducing tourists to a historical site.

"Ari," they all muttered in return. Fang took his place beside Max, and Iggy and Nudge moved to stand between the eraser and me. Angel rounded the corner from the kitchen with Total at her side. She was munching on a chocolate-chip cookie.

She swallowed and said, "You know we're not just going to give her to you."

"We don't want to fight," Fang said reasonably. "Just walk away, Ari."

"Without a little fun? Come on, you know I'm not going to do that. I came for a little entertainment, and then I'm taking Wind back to Dad." He turned to me, crossing his arms. "If you'd just go wait in the truck for me, I'll be out in a second."

I was about to say something when Iggy furiously cut me off.

"No way in hell is she going anywhere with you, fuzzball."

I stared, shocked, at the back of his head.

"Agreed," Nudge put in, taking a threatening step forward.

"If you touch her, you're dead," Max growled.

Fang just smirked. "I think they've said it all."

"Um, guys?" Angel said, looking everyone in the face with her innocent stare. When everyone turned to look at her, she thought, _Incoming._

Before I could register what was happening, everyone was sprinting for the back door, Iggy towing me along by the wrist. As soon as we were through the door, everyone launched themselves into an up-and-away. Still not registering what was happening, Iggy decided I wasn't going fast enough and swung me up with him, carrying me like a baby.

Once we were pretty high up, I struggled until he dropped me, and I whipped out my wings after dropping head-first for a couple of seconds. Soaring upwards back towards the others felt great, like I was part of something. They were all hovering, watching the house. Ari's men wouldn't be able to shoot us at this height. When I'd reached the group, I spun to see what they were watching.

Something small and very fast was flying low over the trees towards the house, where Ari was watching us from the door where we'd been a few seconds before. As the small figure neared the house, it looked to throw something on to the roof and then dart quickly away, shooting up towards us. The sound of gunshots pieced the air, but the figure was swerving too often and in no definite pattern to be hit. Soon, it was out of shooting range.

_The Gasman!_ I realized, eyes widening in surprise, and a little guilt. I'd forgotten about him.

"Go!" he shouted, sounding frantic. "Go, fly!"

"The Godzilla grenade," Iggy whispered above me. "Get out of here! Go, before it detonates!"

We all turned and began flying as fast as we could, darting away. The Gasman quickly caught up with us.

"Why hasn't it gone off yet?" I shouted over the howling of the wind.

"It's big!" he yelled back at me. "We're too—

A colossal _boom_ cut him off, and I looked over my shoulder to see the spot where the house should have been.

"Oh, god!" Iggy screamed, and for a second, I was confused. And then the shockwave hit us.

I flew forward, wings tilting back in a way that felt like they were going to be ripped out, and I screeched in pain. I couldn't hear or see anything through the panic and adrenaline as I lost control of my flight and plummeted towards the ground.

My legs, seemingly of their own accord, folded up to my chest, and I wasn't falling anymore. I looked up, perplexed, into Iggy's face.

"Figures you wouldn't fold your wings before it hit us."

I noticed I was panting with fright when I tried to speak, but I couldn't catch my breath.

_How did he know where I was?_ I wondered.

"You screamed," he said simply. "And no, I didn't just read your mind. It's a reasonable enough question. Give yourself some time; you'll learn not to question what I do."

"Wind, are you alright?" Max called down to me, and I tilted my head to see her looking down on me, a concerned glint in her dark brown eyes. I nodded, quivering from the adrenaline rushing through my veins. She nodded in return. "Well, come on, then. We'll go find someplace to chill for a while and figure out what we're going to do."

_But, the house… it was destroyed…_

"That's the third one," Angel said sadly, clutching Total tightly in her arms. He couldn't fly for very long on his own; she must have caught him in the shockwave.

The third house. And it had just been destroyed because of me.

"Don't be sad, Wind," Angel told me. "It was getting too repetitive around there anyway. And besides, you're part of our family now. It's our job to take care of you, 'kay?" And she smiled that little angelic, innocent smile, and I knew she meant it.


End file.
